“ the most important issue is to provide our firefighters a means out of the building safely and out of harms way”..Chief Gerad Dio

In a typical incident, there can be 3-4 fire trucks, emergency vehicles and police cars and with a fire in a two story building there may be as many as 8 firefighters on the roof and 24 firefighters around and in the building. In this chaotic scene, the Incident Commander (IC) has to monitor and mange as many as 32 or more firefighters at a fire scene while maintaining the role of directing fireground operations for the duration of the incident.

Particularly, the IC must have the ability to locate a fallen firefighter from outside the building in case the firefighter is not accessible from inside the structure in order to knock down walls/obstructions so to retrieve the firefighter in time.

At Alcyone Systems we designed a system that greatly enhances the situational awareness of every firefighter and aggregating all this data to the incident command post outside the building. Our system's accuracy enables firefighters to locate and retrieve a fallen firefighter with the ability to identify which side of a wall a fallen firefighter is located.

In designing this system, we took into consideration the data communications infrastructure that a typical fire department has or will have in order to architect a 3D Location System.

In the figure below, the 3D Locator™ BTS is linked to the Mobile Computer Terminal (MCT) in order to have a seamless integration to the legacy Mobile Data System and provide long range communications between clusters & nodes in building and the base station/Incident Commander outside the building with connectivity to Fire Operations. The base station also shows the Incident Commander where the responders are as mapped on a 3-D “floor plan” displayed using a graphical user interface. This information is continuously monitored by the incident command post using our advanced base station technology.

This requires a simple connection to the MCT via a wireless or wired connection to the USB port. The 3D location application software is loaded in the MCT which will monitor real time the location status of the first responders. A separate PDA type device also has connectivity to the BTS via a wireless USB or Bluetooth technology.

The mobile data system above, is a multi communications network system utilizing an Automatic Vehicle Locator (AVL) system which integrates GPS data over a wireless link and the Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) network which is used to transfer Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) data as well as location tracking data. The mobile units such as the fire truck, depicted below, also has a WLAN/WiMax modem that allows it to communicate and transfer data to and from the Fire Station. The fire station is then connected to the Fire Operations Building via a high speed ethernet connection through a wide area network where all of the servers, CAD systems, and work stations reside. The mobile unit also has the option to link to operations via the CDPD network when out of range of the WLAN network.